TOPICS: Chatbot for Travel   Chatbot for Website    Chatbot Optimization   

Travel Agency Chatbot – How Chatbots Can Help with Online Marketing Challenges Facing Travel Agencies

Travel agencies have always relied on marketing for visibility, but never as much as they do in this internet-driven age. With flight, hotel and tour bookings going online, travel agencies have easier access to a broad spectrum of consumers. At the same time, they find themselves in the midst of intense competition from other agencies. This article examines the online marketing challenges that modern travel agencies face, and how travel agency chatbot development is emerging as a popular solution.

Chatbots and the end of conventional marketing strategies:

Email marketing and pop-ups, once seen as successful replacements for conventional print and video advertisements, are on a rapid decline. Industries like travel and hospitality need to market themselves more than others, which makes it only natural for them to find new and improved ways of engaging their potential and existing customers. Building chatbots has emerged as one of these methods. Travel agency chatbots, for example, serve as an approachable point of contact between an agency website and its visitors. They converse with visitors in their natural language, and dispense thorough, accurate, and personalized advice.

Chatbots and the need for mobile-oriented marketing and support:

Millennial travelers are almost always on mobile, which implies that travel agencies need to tailor their marketing and communications strategies around the use of smartphones. This entails a need for mobile-friendly websites, and – as can be gauged from the success of travel agency chatbots – the need for traveler-friendly chatbot development. Agencies that create a chatbot on their websites eliminate the hassle of manually searching for information on the site. Travelers can instead just converse with the AI bot to get instant and complete information about upcoming flights, hotel rates, sightseeing tours, and so on.

Chatbots gaining visitor attention instantly:

Searching for the cheapest flights and hotels is a key component of the travel planning process. Hotel searches, for example, typically begin with a general sweep of listings in ascending order of price, followed by a comparative search on portals like Airbnb. To avoid losing out to the competition, especially to better-known names, travel agencies have to engage their visitors as soon as they arrive at their website. Chatbot development offers a solution. The best chatbots for travel agencies can even go so far as to act as their agency’s differentiating factor, allowing it to market excellent and personalized customer service as a unique selling point.

Achieving clarity and transparency with Chatbots:

Several travel agencies lose business on account of the lack of clarity on their website. If visitors find it difficult to get a clear picture of the travel packages and services offered by the agency, they immediately move on to the next agency. This loss of traffic can be avoided by building travel agency chatbots that can help customers with detailed and clearly presented information about hotel rooms, flights, attractions, car rentals, bundled packages, and so on. Any additional information that a particular visitor needs can also be fetched by the chatbot.

Chatbots cost considerations:

One of the biggest reasons for the meteoric rise in the use of online chatbots is their ability to stay online round the clock, and address thousands of queries and complaints while maintaining the same speed and consistency. For a travel agency looking to run a tight ship, hiring and maintaining human staff that can produce comparable results would be prohibitively expensive. In contrast, it costs a negligible amount of money to create a chatbot and implement it on a website. Once created, the travel agency chatbot can continue to deliver the same quality of work at all times.

Discover the applications of online chatbots through our blog posts, or get in touch with us for assistance with chatbot development for your own website.